Storage!

[Photo-John]

I just ordered a new external hard drive. This is my third since I bought a digital SLR. I've filled 100 Gigs of storage since I bought my EOS 1D, about two years ago. Yesterday I order a 160 Gig USB 2.0 external drive for $165 from B&H. $1 a Gig. Storage is getting cheap! And internal drives cost less than half as much.

Anyway, be warned. Commiting to digital photography means storage issues. It's cheaper than film and processing. But there are still costs and planning involved.

[darkman]

I just ordered a new external hard drive. This is my third since I bought a digital SLR. I've filled 100 Gigs of storage since I bought my EOS 1D, about two years ago. Yesterday I order a 160 Gig USB 2.0 external drive for $165 from B&H. $1 a Gig. Storage is getting cheap! And internal drives cost less than half as much.

Anyway, be warned. Commiting to digital photography means storage issues. It's cheaper than film and processing. But there are still costs and planning involved.

I added a 80Gb internal hard drive to my machine for $0.50 per gig recently and since quit burning CD's. At 700Mb burning CD's became a pain in the arse!

I was at the store yesterday staring at external dvd burners. They cost about twice as much as an internal. While checking these out I also looked at external hard drives. Now I can't decide which way to go! Both have pros and cons.

Mike

[kafin8ed]

yep, since starting on this photographic journey...first scanning and now shooting digital images I have bought a 60, 80, and a 120 GB drive, now those sit externally to the 60GB drive in my laptop (which currently has 3.6GB of free space!). I'm about ready to buy a DVD burner and am considering getting a RAID setup for mirrored redundancy. I'm still deciding if that is overkill or not. As long as i keep doing this and am at it say 5 years from now I think it will if anything still underestimate my future storage needs as MP for cameras goes up and I shoot more and more. Incidentlally I'd still have this problem with film. I didn't scan as many shots shen I shot film but the scans were enourmous - 120MB sometimes...so I can't really blame the switch to digital personally...

[paulnj]

I just got a WESTERN DIGITAL 120gig EXTERNAL for $150 from newegg ;)

swapped 48 gigs that I HADN'T BURNT YET...from 11 months of shooting ;)

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...=BROWSE&depa=1

[another view]

Couple of questions. I've been backing up on CD, but it's really slow to find something later that way...

Do you still back up on CD (as redundancy) or is the HD alone enough?

Is the Buffer Size of the drive important? Maxtor has 8MB, but most others are about 2MB. Here's the one I'm looking at: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/cont...=307190&is=REG

Do you save all images to it as opposed to the internal HD, then copy later to the external HD?

Last one - do you keep it connected to the system all the time, or store it when not used?

Thanks!

[paulnj]

here GET 90 GIGS MORE....

FOR 5 CENTS

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...144-329&depa=1

I plan to keep all files on internal and external AND burn to DVD/CD

i keep the EXTERNAL off my machine when not in use ;)

[Sebastian]

I just did the math, I have almost 800 gigs of HD space betwen all of my machines. That's almost a TEARABYTE.

Anyway, I use a WD Media Center External with front-button backup and media readers, 250 gigs. That is my backup, only goes on for backup, turned off afterwards. Internally I have 380 gigs internally on my photo machine, 120 of which is ONLY for photos, and that's the drive that gets backed up to my external. I never wipe the 120, so I have fast access to my files and so the two drives are redundant.

Steve,

Have you read all the news about CDs lately? I suggest you keep everything on HDs, on multiple if you can. Not much more expensive, but as time goes on we're finding out how poor CDs are for archiving, and I doubt things will get better.

[another view]

Have you read all the news about CDs lately? I suggest you keep everything on HDs, on multiple if you can. Not much more expensive, but as time goes on we're finding out how poor CDs are for archiving, and I doubt things will get better.

Yes I have - that's part of my interest. From several sources I've heard that these are the best so I might start using them: http://store.mam-a-store.com/standar...hive-gold.html

But the HD has a lot of advantages so I'll probably do both like Paul says.

[Wings]

Have you read all the news about CDs lately? I suggest you keep everything on HDs, on multiple if you can. Not much more expensive, but as time goes on we're finding out how poor CDs are for archiving, and I doubt things will get better

I don't believe everything they write. I have CDRs that are close to 10 years old and there is nothing wrong with their data, their checksums are still the same.

It's important to use quality CDRs, a good writer, never record using max speed and that you store your CDRs under correct enviromental conditions. Always add checksums (I use SFV) so that you know in what kind of state your CDRs are. Also make sure that your CDR's are 100% readable on different machines.

And if you ever have doubt... there is software that will add special recovery volumes. The thing with CDRs is... data doesn't get lost all at once, so you will always have plenty of time to recover most data with special recovery methods and very likely 100% if you originally used special archiving software.

Other option, redundant CDR backups, using two different brands CDRs. More expensive, but extra redundancy.

CDR are read only, hard drives aren't, even setting a read only bit doesn't protect you. So your backup data could be altered or deleted by user or system error without the user even knowing it.

If you know what you're doing, then you're so much more on the safer side with CDR or DVD.
Also backing up some 250 GB of data on some 30 9.4 DVDs is much safer than on one single hard drive, because you spread your data over 30 media.

I would never advice people to rely 100% on hard drives for their photographs. One single virus action, one stupid mistake by the user, a fire, theft, you name it and everything (!) might be gone. The fact that all that data is on 2 hard drives (even if one is external and in another location) would make me very nervous, because I know about so many things that can be desastrous. I've met people who were in tears after losing some hundred meg of precious art or photographs.

DVDR is another option and soon 10GB will be quite common, prices will go down and from what I've read their life expectancy is as good if not even better than CDR.

[Asylum Steve]

I know this goes completely against the grain of this thread, but I have often thought about the terrible "what if" I was to lose all my photographic materials. I began thinking about this when I was still shooting film, but it certainly applies to digital as well.

I decided that I would be ok if I lost all my work in a fire, flood, whatever. The only photos I truely would miss would be family pics, and of course friends and a few old girlfriends...

I've given it a lot of thought over the years, and I honestly believe this. While photography is my life's work, it isn't my LIFE. To me, future earning potential aside, they are just material things, possessions...

I would simply start over. Besides, the photo I'm the most excited about has always been the one I'm ABOUT TO TAKE.

Don't get me wrong, though. I take my storage and backup of digital data seriously, and hope I never have to experience a loss of that magnitude. I just think if it happened, it wouldn't be the end of the world, and I'd be able to deal with it...

I just ordered a new external hard drive. This is my third since I bought a digital SLR. I've filled 100 Gigs of storage since I bought my EOS 1D, about two years ago. Yesterday I order a 160 Gig USB 2.0 external drive for $165 from B&H. $1 a Gig. Storage is getting cheap! And internal drives cost less than half as much.

Anyway, be warned. Commiting to digital photography means storage issues. It's cheaper than film and processing. But there are still costs and planning involved.

[Sebastian]

Wings,

CDs and hard drives are both pretty much equal. One has benefits over theother and vice versa. Just as I don't lose all the data at once on a CD, neither do I do that with a HD. And like I mentioned, I keep two drives with identical data on it. I am counting on one dying. If I was burning CDs, I would be foolish not to burn AT LEAST two. But I hate waiting, so I prefer to have all my images instantly accessible to me, instead of sifting through CDs of them.

You may have CDs that are ten years old that are still great, big deal, so do I and anyone else out there. WHat worries me is the CDs I burned last year that are unreadable now. Luckily they were just backups of files I still have on my hard drives. The fact of the matter is, you can get the best media one week and another batch another week, and they will vary wildly, from the same manufacturer. One disc will last years, one will fail in half the time. With a hard drive I have the same chances.

It's great that you would never recommend 100% hard drives to anyone, in the end it doesn't matter one bit. Whether it's CDs, hard drives or DVDs, the only thing that matters when it comes to backup, is REDUNDANCY. Everyone will pick what media they use on whatever factors they deem worthy. They all have their drawbacks, and THEY WILL ALL FAIL. That's why a second copy is necessary, no matter what media it is.

And if you know of one study that shows that when stored properly, magnetic drives die sooner than opticals, I'd love to read it. Until then, they'll both be two different beasts that do the same thing, but differently, abnd die equally as often, albeit differently.

[Sebastian]

Asylum Steve,

You hit the nail on the head. Some care must be taken, within reason. And the steps we take are adequate, but we can't protect against every situation. Some things are just not worth fighting.

[Peter_AUS]

It's really interesting reading about everyones ideas regading backups. But I haven't seen one person mention Tape backup as an option. These I know are old to a lot of people, but businesses still use tapes to do backups, every day of the working week, which is sort of nearly fail safe. The most that can be lost theoretically is about 1 days work.

This is still a very viable option.

Personally myself at present, I burn to CD/RW and DVD/RW's mainly because I can reuse them, costs still haven't gotten anywhere near what they cost over their for well know brand names which is all I use myself. I am contemplating getting an external drive, but after reading this, maybe getting an external drives box like something that can take 4 drives and build that up with external drives as they get bigger and cheaper. Start with one drive say 120G, already have an 80, 40 and 20 G drives internally, still have some old 320meg drives around as well. That might be another option maybe.